It sat the standards for monophonic analog synthesizers. It was (and still is) a model and the ideal for dozens of analog instruments. It has been cloned and cast into countless digital images. It has a worthy successor (the Voyager) from the same family tree. And still it remains unsurpassed. The Minimoog.

… there it is! Only 30 pieces of the VCO.3 were built before a flood destroyed all the instrument’s documents in 1973. The Italian company GRS with headquarter in Florence is one of the great unknowns in synthesizer history. The VCO.3 with – guess what – 3 VCOs looks very interesting. Built-in spring reverb, tube amplifier … Too bad there is no CV/Gate. The panel labels are interesting. RUMORE seems quite suitable for “noise”, doesn’t it?

2 weeks ago a restored VCO.3 appeared in a shop in Bologna. We have received permission to publish the pictures of the instrument.

For more information about the GRS VCO.3 see Peter Forrest’s “The A-Z Of Analogue Synthesisers” (2nd edition), p. 163.